Nicholas
Rescher was born in 1928 in Hagen,
Germany, where
his father had established a law practice after serving as a German army
officer during World War I.He is a
cousin of the eminent orientalist Oskar Rescher. His family emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1938, and he was educated there,
receiving the Ph.D. at PrincetonUniversity in 1951, while
still at the age of twenty-two. Since 1961, he has taught at the University of
Pittsburgh, where he serves as Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy
and also as Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In the course of
a long academic career, he has published over three hundred articles in
scholarly journals, has contributed to many encyclopedias and reference works,
and has written some hundred books in various areas of philosophy, including
epistemology, metaphysics, value theory and social philosophy, logic, the
philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy.

In a
productive research career extending over six decades, he has established
himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a
many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together
threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism.And apart from this larger program Rescher
has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception
autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the
medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics
as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and the philosophy of
science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher
has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and
Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi
method of forecasting.

Some dozen
books devoted to various aspects of Rescher's philosophical work have been
published in recent years. He has been elected to membership in the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Europaea, the Royal Society of Canada,
the Institut Internationale de Philosophie, and the Academie International de
Philosophie des Sciences and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland.He has been awarded honorary
doctorates by eight universities on three continents. Its fellows elected him
an honorary member of Corpus ChristiCollege, Oxford,
and in 1983 he received an Alexander von Humboldt Humanities Prize, awarded "in
recognition of the research accomplishments of humanistic scholars of
international distinction." In 2007 he was awarded the Aquinas Medal of the
American Catholic Philosophical Association. His 2005book, Scholastic Meditations
(Catholic University of America Press) was awarded the Cardinal Mercier Prize. A
vivid picture of his personal and intellectual development is given in his 2005
Autobiography (Frankfurt:
Ontos).

From 1964
to 1993 Rescher edited the American
Philosophical Quarterly and for many years the History of Philosophy Quarterly as well.During 1969-75 he served a term as Secretary
General of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (an
organ of UNESCO).He has served as a
President of the American Philosophical Association, the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, and the American Metaphysical Society, and also of
the Charles S. Peirce Society and the Leibniz Society of America. Over the
years his work has been supported by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science
Foundations.

After first
working primarily on topics in formal logic and in the history of logic, Rescher
has, since the late 1960's, increasingly devoted himself to problems of
metaphysics and the theory of knowledge.In his writings, he has sought to revive and refurbish the idealistic
tradition in epistemology and metaphysics in the light of approaches drawn from
American pragmatism. His work on this program combines a 19th century concern
for large-scale systematizing with a 20th century Anglo-American penchant for
specialized investigations using the modern formal tools of philosophical
analysis.His approach to philosophy is
comprehensively expounded in a trilogy entitled A System of Pragmatic Idealism published by Princeton University
Press in 1991-93. Rescher also has diversified interests in the history of
philosophy, and has written extensively about medieval philosophy as well as
about Leibniz, Kant, and Peirce.Early
in his career Rescher made an extensive study of medieval Arabic work in logic
and he was the first to bring to light its important contributions to the
theory of temporal modalities.

Most recently, Reschers contributions to philosophy have
primarily involved: the rehabilitation of idealism in general and the coherence
theory of truth in particular, the revival and reconstruction of pragmatism; the
development of inconsistency-tolerant logic, and the development of an
exponential retardation theory of scientific progress.

In industrial manufacture, machine tools are tools of the
creation of tools. On analogy, Rescher has become common for the creation of
philosophical machine tools--concepts and theories useful for the further
development of philosophical ideas and theses.These have often proven to be eponymous and in various cases, a
particular concept of principle has come to be associated with his name. (See
Appendix 1.)The Encyclopedia of Bioethics cites Rescher's much-reprinted 1969 paper
on the subject as one of the very first in the field.

Throughout
his career Rescher has been concerned with elucidating the processes by which
knowledge--an scientific-knowledge in particular--is established and
systematized.However, beginning with
his 1976 book on Scientific Progress
(Blackwells of Oxford, 1978) this concern for the nature of information took
the turning of a quantitative approach, eventually resulting in his 2005 book Epistemetrics (Cambridge University
Press, 2005), which inaugurated the project of articulating the general theory
of knowledge from a quantitative point of view. Rescher has also dedicated
considerable effort to exploring the limits of science and of human knowledge
in general, stressing in particular the impracticability of gaining a present
understanding of future cognitive progress. In epistemology and philosophy of
science, he is best described as an analytic pragmatist in placing epistemic
priority on the methods of the natural sciences as a source of both
understanding the empirical world and directing our action within it. It
is part of Rescher's coherentism that he regards science as seeking the best
fit between the data of experience and the conjecture we make in our attempts
to resolve questions.

Rescher's pragmatic
theory of knowledge differs from that of the original "utilitarian" pragmatism,
which takes a theory to be true (or justified) it its acceptance is
useful. Instead, Rescher's pragmatism is methodological: a theory
is taken to be true (or justified) if it is based on the application of methods
which have proved themselves by their usefulness--for instance, by successful
predictions. So viewed, utility functions only at a remove.

Yet, while Rescher ascribes a certain primacy
to plausible and inductive and to the methods of natural science as natural
products of cultural evolution, he nevertheless denies that the only
legitimately answerable questions are those that admit of answer under the
methods of science. He defends metaphysics as a philosophical venture seeking
to examine and elucidate the presuppositions of natural science, which natural
science cannot do without viciously circular reasoning. He has also claimed
that such presuppositions find their ultimate justification in the consequences
of accepting them as instrumentalities of need-satisfaction. An emphasis
on the role of common sensical presumptions in the development of knowledge is
yet another characteristic feature of Rescher's work.On the question of scientific realism,
Rescher has argued for a particular form of instrumentalism in science without
endorsing instrumentalism as a whole on the issue of factual knowledge.
For Rescher, commonsense beliefs (those beliefs so obviously true that we
cannot even imagine factual conditions under which they would be false) do
succeed in correctly describing the physical world because such beliefs
sufficiently vague not to be likely to suffer truth value revision. However,
our scientific beliefs forego any such protection imprecision.

Of Rescher's varied contributions, perhaps that of the greatest
significance is the theory of technology-geared progress in natural science of
this 1978 Scientific Progress as
viewed in the context of the wider-ranging quantification of the theory of
knowledge of his 2005 Epistemetrics.
This epistemological approach has found a widespread resonance, the former work
being among the very few books by contemporary American philosophers to be
translated into French.

A
persistent theme in Rescher's philosophy is man's cognitive limitations and the
imperfection (and imperfectability) of human knowledge. However, he does not
succumb to skepticism, nihilism, or relativism, all of which he roundly
rejects. He argues on pragmatic grounds that there is an objective reality that
is intelligible, the truth of which can be obtained by human reason; and though
perfect knowledge is impossible, adequate knowledge for the realization of
human ends is not.

Rescher's approach is idealistic
because it prioritizes the sort of mind-imposed presumptions and because it
regards systematic coherence as the criterion of truth; fallibilistic because
it denies that knowledge can provide more than an imperfect approximation of
reality; and pragmatic because it maintains that the validity of
knowledge-claims depends on their utility in furthering human purposes.
Rescher's pragmatism envisions an objective pragmatism of what works
impersonally, rather than a subjective pragmatism of what works for me or for
us. It is applied not only in our factual commitments but also to our
value commitments. As he sees it, values secure objectivity because the
manner of our human emplacement in reality imposes upon us certain basic
projects not constructed or freely chosen, but simply given. About these
we cannot properly deliberate.

A further characteristic feature of Rescher's approach
is its systematic integration of matters of value (i.e., norms--be they
cognitive or affective) and matters of experientially determined fact.
For Rescher morality is basically a matter of safeguarding the real or best
interests of people and while the identification of such interests involves an
irreducibly normative element, the processes of their effective cultivation are
something we can only learn about empirically. Morality thus weaves
issues of fact and value into a seamless whole. Moreover, the axiology of
Rescher's system aims at deriving values from human needs and purposes and
evaluating knowledge-claims in the light of them. His concern for human values
has led to his position being described as post-positivistic.

As of the
1980's Rescher worked increasingly on issues of metaphilosophy and
philosophical methodology. He has argued in considerable detail for an aporetic
and dialectical perspective on the development of philosophy. His general
theory of aporetics has been applied by Rescher in areas as distinct as
metaphilosophy, paradox theory, and the epistemology of
conditions/counterfactual reasonings.

Rescher
espouses a metaphysical view he calls philosophical standardism. He thinks, for example, that human knowledge
is fundamentally and standardly a matter of belief that is justifiably held to
be true. Prevalent counterexamples to the classical definition of knowledge as
justified-true-belief ignore the fact that our concepts are based on limited
generalizations that are subject to revision and thus reflect what is normally
and typically the case rather than what is unexceptionally and necessarily so.In consequence traditional philosophy is too preoccupied
with abstract necessities of general principle which do not capture our
understanding of the world as it is actually experienced, and the price we pay
for his more modest construal of philosophical generalizations is to
acknowledge the essential open-endedness of our philosophically relevant
concepts.

However,
Rescher strongly opposes the fashionable nihilism of a "post-philosophical"
age. Notwithstanding concession to the pervasive pluralism of the times he
maintains a traditionalistic dedication to a philosophical search for truth.
Granting that people's views are of course bound to reflect differences in
backgrounds of experience and that they are also bound to differ
constitutionally as well. The undeniable diversity of the human circumstances
do not support scepticism or indifferent relativism because objectivity is
preserved through the circumstances that certain issues resolutions are
impersonally and objectively appropriate once those circumstances are given.

An
extensive anthology of Rescher's collected papers has been published by ONTOS
Verlag of Frankfurt.With well over 120
papers in some seventeen volumes, this collection offers a panoramic overview
of Rescher's work in many areas of philosophy and conveys a vivid impression of
his doctrinal views and philosophical methods.

Now over
eighty years of age, Rescher continues to be active in teaching philosophy at
the University of
Pittsburgh.He regularly offers courses on Leibniz, Kant,
and Metaphysics & Epistemology. He is responsible for the rediscovery and
re-creation of Leibniz's machina decyptophoria,
a cipher machine that anticipated the notorious ENIGMA of World War II fame.

Rescher is also responsible for two further items of historical
rediscovery and reconstruction: (1) the model of cosmic evolution in
Anaximander [See Robert Hahn, Anaximander
and the Architects (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), (2) the medieval Arabic
theory of model syllogistic (See Tony Street, "Toward a History of Syllogistic
after Avicenna: Notes on Rescher's Studies on Arabic Modal Logic," Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 11
(2000), pp. 209-28.

In acknowledgement of his extensive gifting to the institution,
the University of Pittsburgh established in 2010 the Nicholas Rescher prize for
contributions to systematic philosophy. Awarded biennially the prize consists
of a gold medal together with a sum of $25,000. It bears comparison with other
prestigious cultural prizes such as the Pulitzer prize for journalism and the
creative arts administered by Columbia University and valued at $10,000, or of
the Peabody Prize for the electronic media, administered by the University of
Georgia and valued at $10,000. In 2011 he was awarded the Order of Merit
Premier Class Bundesdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the Federal Republic of
Germany in recognition of his services to philosophy and to German-American
collaboration in this field.

Appendix 1

Some ideas
and innovations associated eponymously with Rescher's name are:

((For detailed
information about these items see the references accessible via Google .))

Additionally, Rescher inaugurated the conception of autodescriptive systems of formal logic,
as well as the conception of vagrant
predicated, which, while known to be applicable, nevertheless have no
specifiable application--"forever lost Roman coin of Caesar's day" for example.